‘The Arab Spring didn’t go so well.’
‘We are a new country. There are more and more people online—’
Yussopova’s phone rang before she could tell me that the internet was ushering in democracy. She took the call in the kitchen. I made a physical search for the listening device: bookshelves were good cover, a lot of visual information to lose a bug in; light fittings work, and mean you can mask the electronic emanations. Finally I knelt, felt under the table and found it. A disc the size of a ten-pence piece, attached magnetically. Inside was a voice-activated micro-transmitter. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you’d planted a few yourself. I considered removing it, then heard Yussopova returning and straightened.
‘Did Vanessa ever come here?’ I asked.
‘Vanessa? Yes, several times.’
‘Did she help you with equipment?’
‘She gave us laptops, phones. All more secure than the ones we had. She recommended software, VPNs.’
‘Flash Free?’
‘Yes.’
Nice to see Joanna had kept her styles. Flash Free was known among intelligence operatives as inherently compromised software, which meant whichever crew she was spying for would have access to all the activists’ computers. I suspected Yussopova’s concern was overgenerous.
‘Vanessa has been so helpful for us,’ Yussopova said. ‘She is a brave woman.’
‘She certainly is.’ I took a final look through the anti-Saracen literature. ‘Have you had any direct contact with this company?’
‘Only petitions.’
We swapped numbers.
‘What are you going to do?’ Yussopova asked.
‘I’m not sure. Please, please let me know if you hear the slightest thing.’
‘I will.’
The black Renault followed me when I left.
SIXTEEN
The driver was European-looking. Tall in his seat, a touch of flab around the face, something very English in a former-military way. He kept close behind me. It was conspicuous: either a rushed job, a lack of training or meant to intimidate. I drove to Khan Shatyr and parked. I went into the mall, to the food court, got a coffee and browsed on my phone while my man sat on a bench on the other side of the court. I looked at what I could find on Saracen. They were headquartered in London, interests in Vietnam, Congo, Angola, Mexico. Evidently they found the Middle East too squeaky clean. Robert Carter had bought the company for £12.5 billion and the inflow of fresh capital had funded its Kazakh forays.
London would be waking up around now. I gave Olivia Gresham a call.
‘Saracen Oil and Gas. Any feelings about them?’
‘Saracen? Jesus, what are you doing with them? Is that why you’re in Kazakhstan?’
‘Possibly. What are they up to?’
‘They think there’s untapped fields still to be discovered under Kazakhstan. The Kazakh government took a lot of money off them for the honour of taking a look.’
‘Have they been facing trouble over their activity here?’
‘It’s oil and gas – what do you think? Trouble from good people, trouble from bad people.’
‘Who are the bad people?’
‘Rival energy companies, I imagine.’
‘Who do Saracen employ on the intelligence front?’
‘Probably Vectis. Saracen were using them when they ran into trouble in the DCR. Know anything about this? Why are Saracen so hot for Central Asia all of a sudden?’
‘I’ve no idea, but you’ll be the first to hear if I find anything.’
The watcher was still there, still surreptitiously keeping an eye on me. That afforded me a good look at him. He was ruddy-faced under a peaked cap, greying blond, with a slight curl to the hair, blue-eyed, pink-skinned. There wasn’t a team – he didn’t have surveillance skills. I was definitely dealing with former military.
I made another call to a friend at Kilgariff & Co, a private intelligence outfit big on energy.
‘Do you work with Saracen?’
‘No, Vectis have the Saracen contract. Why?’
‘Following leads. Thanks.’
I knew Vectis Global Insight, as much as anyone did. Boutique, headquartered in Mayfair, crammed with former MI6 of all stripes. The company sold a range of underground services to big corporations. Their website advertised ‘strategic advice and analysis for leaders operating in complex environments’. There were a lot of complex environments and the blue-chips paid well. You won’t find ‘espionage’ on their books, but you might well come across ‘security consultancy’, a trail that led via a listed Georgian building to some less respectable corners of the earth. As a rule of thumb, with PI companies, more wood panelling meant fewer moral scruples.
A lot of them appeared in the 1990s. The intelligence budget was down and taxpayers’ money spent on arms and assassinations was a shit-storm waiting to break. British businesses said something had to be done – they needed to compete and had money to spend; why couldn’t they just give the money to MI6 and access the desired muscle? That didn’t look good either. Companies like Vectis appeared, a whole realm of shadow intelligence agencies with complex relationships to the state. MI6 officers knew them as potential future employers, often useful, occasionally making difficult environments even murkier. The ones we called white-hat companies could advertise their services up front: they relied on a combination of retired police and military with enough old-boy connections willing to check the odd database for them, armies of poorly paid interns stitching together passable reports. Black hats went the extra mile. They solved problems in ways the client didn’t want to know about, and their front windows were accordingly opaque. They cost more, and were usually worth it.
Vectis was black-hat. Set up by Callum Walker, former SAS, former SovOps desk in Six. I knew this because he’d tried to recruit me a couple of years ago. We’d met at one of those posturing, closed-shop conferences that spies get invited to, where CEOs and former foreign secretaries mingle. Walker seemed to know a bit about me. Out of curiosity and habit I agreed to drinks at the Special Forces Club the following evening. I figured that an open channel to Vectis would be as useful to me as I was to them. At the very least we could avoid treading on each other’s toes.
I wasn’t interested in going on their payroll, but I liked Walker. He had a blunt, straight-talking style rare in the intelligence services. He seemed more at home in the private sector. He enjoyed showing me the club, hidden behind an unmarked door in Knightsbridge, photographs of fallen comrades across the walls. Now he was putting surveillance on me.
I called Vectis as Robert Carter’s PA and got client levels of deference. I said Carter was heading to Astana and wanted a point of contact. I was told Callum Walker was there now, staying at the Hilton Garden Inn. They wouldn’t give more than that but said they’d ensure he got in contact asap. I hung up and began to move.
I paid to go into the spa, reversed my jacket, exited through staff doors. No sign of the tail when I got down to my car.
The Hilton was smart without being ostentatious, stretching the length of a central block just north of Lovers’ Park. As far as I could tell, the park got its name from a bad statue of two lovers in its centre. Current conditions weren’t going to sustain flesh and blood romance. The hotel gazed optimistically across it. In a few months the view would thaw.
A young receptionist was smiling as soon as I’d cleared the doors.
‘Has Callum Walker checked in yet?’
She consulted her computer.
‘Yes, he checked in yesterday.’
‘Which room?’
‘Two zero three.’
I went up. A Do Not Disturb sign hung on the doorknob. No answer when I knocked. I took a glasses case from inside my jacket and removed a device the size of a phone battery that had made my life a lot easier on several occasions. The beauty of globalisation meant that one firm produced 60 per cent of hotel card locks. And every single Onity key-card lock has a DC power s
ocket on the base, a small circular port beneath the lock used to charge up the battery and program the lock with the hotel’s own site code. Which means when you plug into the socket, you can read the key from the lock’s stored memory, play it back and turn the handle.
I was about to walk in when a voice behind me said, ‘Stop there or I’ll shoot.’
SEVENTEEN
His voice was calm, semi-automatic pistol held steady as he approached from the end of the corridor. It was my follower from the black Renault.
‘Hands out, buddy. Let’s see them.’
I raised my hands.
When the gun was at my head, he said: ‘What are you after?’
‘Joanna Lake.’
‘She’s not in there.’
‘How many guesses do I get?’
He tapped me above the ear with the barrel, directed me along the corridor to the emergency stairs. We descended. I had visions of service levels, basements with bins into which a body could be folded. I was prodded into the first-floor bar.
The hotel had gone for a low-lit, burnished copper theme, which suited the Englishman neatly folded into an armchair, fingers interlaced. The place was empty apart from staff and two expensively dressed women in a far corner. My chaperone had made the gun disappear. We were just three men looking like business.
‘Elliot Kane,’ Walker said.
‘Callum.’
Walker’s suit was crumpled. His eyes suggested an overnight flight. He had a moustache that might have looked businesslike to some but said nothing to me aside from former-military. He looked like a man who had just flown into Central Asia because of an almighty fuck-up. I took a seat opposite him and a waiter appeared.
‘Have a drink,’ Walker said. ‘Warm up.’
I ordered a brandy. Walker ordered a Scotch and a bottle of sparkling water. The guard declined refreshment. He had taken the sofa, back straight, hands clasped between his knees. His top button was tight around his throat. The years since military service could be measured in kilograms. Walker surprised me by pulling out a packet of Rothmans, lighting one with a plastic yellow lighter. He set packet and lighter on the coffee table, beside some pink flowers floating in a stone dish, leaned back, exhaled out of the corner of his mouth. The drinks arrived with a tray of cashews and an ice bucket. I took a sip.
‘Where is she?’ I said.
‘We have no idea.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
He spread his hands, face grave.
‘Vanished. I thought perhaps you lot might be doing better on this than we are.’
‘Us lot? I’m not here on behalf of the British government. She contacted me. I came over.’
Walker looked sceptical.
‘What did she say?’ he asked.
‘Not much. It seemed like she might be in trouble, though. I need to know what’s going on before I give you any more.’
Walker splashed some water into his whisky. A gold chain rattled on his left wrist. Like his guard, he’d been somewhere a lot sunnier not that long ago; the skin of his ears and nose was still flaked.
‘Who have you spoken to?’ Walker asked.
‘Not very many people.’
‘Obviously, it’s a sensitive situation.’
‘I’m sure.’
Walker hesitated.
I pressed. ‘Right now you’re in more trouble than I am. You might appreciate my help.’ This didn’t get an immediate denial.
‘You’re working for Saracen,’ I said. He tapped his cigarette, studied me again. I knew what threshold we were at – either I was going to be permitted entrance or not. In my experience it’s the wrong time to push. I took a mouthful of brandy. There had been no suggestion they knew about the dead man. That was a card I held.
‘Do Six know?’ Walker asked.
‘I get the feeling they have an interest. Why would that be? Have you not told them?’
‘Vectis’s relationship with your employer is somewhat strained, as you can imagine.’
‘All sounds very delicate.’
I could relate to his impatience with the well-spoken, well-educated men and women at the top of Six and the FCO and the MOD. There was a no-nonsense edge of grammar school in his intonation, which endeared him to me. When we had last met he had described himself as a scholarship boy like me, army scholarship to Sandhurst in his case. You wouldn’t have guessed that, before Six, Walker had spent four years in the SAS – not if your idea of the SAS was unthinking action men. In reality the SAS was defined more by mavericks, especially for Walker’s generation. They had a restless drive. It meant their thoughts often ended up turning to making money, and they set about it with gung-ho confidence, a lot of contacts and not always sensitivity to the nuances of a business environment. Walker looked energetic and out of his depth.
‘Well, I wish she’d tried to contact us.’
‘How long had she been over here?’
‘Six weeks.’
‘And she went missing five days ago?’
‘That’s right. Last contact was on the morning of the fourth.’
‘What was she doing?’
‘Saracen are involved in a big deal over here. They’ve got a few active fields but want to buy a lot more. But their reputation is somewhat tarnished, shall we say, which means activists were on them before they’d even got going. When Saracen got taken over last year, the new owners hired a company called Piper Anderson Communications to try to clean things up. And Piper Anderson hired us. Obviously they needed to know who was doing what – in the environmentalist community, in rival companies, in the Kazakh government. So we sent Joanna over.’
‘How long’s she been working for you?’
‘Six months.’
‘Really? She only left Six in April.’
He saw what I was thinking: Six had a process for those jumping ship. Intel officers were precious and dangerous and sensitive, whether or not you still wanted to employ them.
‘We had words. They weren’t sorry to see her leave, it seemed.’
‘Why not?’
‘Falling-outs. Obviously I wasn’t privy to the details. We softened her landing financially.’
‘What did she bring for that? Intel? Contacts?’
‘No.’
‘But you headhunted her.’
‘She approached us, actually.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not? We’re a good employer, even if you seemed unconvinced. She wanted out of Six quickly, without losing too many pay-cheques. And she wanted a change of scene. We warned her the biggest danger in Astana would be boredom.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said: “Good”.’ He stubbed his cigarette. A waitress tried to swap his ashtray for a new one and he waved her away. ‘What did Elena Yussopova have to say?’ he asked.
‘Didn’t you hear?’
‘Come on, Elliot.’
‘She thought someone might have approached Vanessa with information. Any idea about that?’
‘No.’
‘Did she have any kind of counter-surveillance team?’
‘None.’
‘She was here alone.’
‘That’s right. We agreed minimal contact. She was very much running her own operation. We offered backup, she declined.’
That sounded like Joanna. The bigger the team, the more conspicuous you were. Still, I’d never known her avoid risks. She was someone who liked to step outside the wire, in military parlance. I could see the set-up from Walker’s point of view: you’ve got a pro, she says she can run the operation, you save a lot of money. You’ve won the contract over more established outfits because you promise the client more for less. And it’s only a few eco-activists that you’re messing with; not exactly Moscow rules. You’re looking at the bottom line and someone’s abducting your employees.
‘Where was Joanna staying?’
‘The Radisson.’
‘Had she packed?’
‘Yes. We’ve tr
awled every border crossing, every airline. There’s nothing to suggest she left the country. Which just leaves 2.7 million square kilometres to search.’
‘Did she have access to a vehicle?’
‘Not to our knowledge.’
‘Any hint that she thought she might be in danger?’
‘Never. And it shouldn’t have been a dangerous job. We gave her a few weeks to get us a picture of Kazakhstan, where it was going. This is about oil in Central Asia, so obviously you’re going to be prepared for trouble, but she hadn’t reported any concerns. It was mostly planting bugs and picking up gossip: local media, local groups.’
‘Was she armed?’
He looked at me, curiously.
‘I’ve been generous. I think it’s time you told us what you know.’
I wondered what Joanna was doing risking her life for an oil company. Maybe, after all the smoke and mirrors of Shefford, there was something honest about oil. It was real. Maybe she wanted to cash in on her experience. We’d need money, she had said. I couldn’t bring myself to believe she was doing this for us. I imagined that moment of decision: the thought of Kazakhstan, ice and emptiness. The simplicity of it, compared with the hot and complicated places where we had operated on dubious pretexts. When Walker and I met at the Special Forces Club his job offer had reminded me of the conversation that led me over the threshold into Six: offhand, almost childish. ‘Fancy a bit of adventure? A challenge? Not many rewards, but you’ll have a chance to work off your own bat, explore the world a bit.’ I had the sense that he wanted me there in the way we want good friends to share our vices, for both physical and moral companionship. What enticed Joanna to Vectis, of all companies? She wasn’t someone who stumbled into things.
‘Do Saracen know about any of this?’ I asked.
‘Our clients aren’t interested in operational details. They’re looking for oil, not missing investigators.’
‘And they won’t notice the sudden absence of briefings?’
‘That’s our problem. Obviously this is an embarrassment.’
‘I hope, wherever Joanna is, she’s not too embarrassed.’
Walker didn’t bother defending the crassness.
A Shadow Intelligence Page 12
